Thanks for sharing this.. when I was around 4 years old my parents, a relative, and I were in and out of a hospital.

We were going through a really tough time dealing with a life-altering diagnosis of one of my siblings. A lot of anger and sadness, especially from my parents.

But - the only thing I actually remember from the hospital was playing Galaga in the hospital game room with my relative. Since I was 4 years old, I always wondered (a) why it is such a vivid memory and (b) why I can't remember my family or myself being upset. Quite surreal to see that this specific scenario has been studied.

I remember learning Rails by reading a book, largely in the waiting rooms at hospitals - the times I was learning it, I can only remember the book, whereas the times I didn't have it, I remember the other emotions. Interesting.

I don't think it's exactly the same process, but I recall Kumail Nanjiani (Screenwriter and star of The Big Sick) saying for the longest time he couldn't stand the sound of collecting coins in Mario games because it reminded him of the time he'd play Mario in the waiting room of a hospital while his then girlfriend (now wife) was in a coma.

I think it can be an extremely useful tool, but need be applied carefully. It can be therapeutic when dealing with unwanted emotions, but unfortunately sometimes those emotions need to run their course--they're designed as self-defense mechanisms to protect ourselves. Disassociation at the wrong time can enable more problems, sadly.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I used to game pretty hard and I know there was almost no better way to blow off stress. Of course, it had its down sides too. Distraction is a remarkably powerful tool. I've also experienced this with relationship drama. Sometimes, after a big argument, the best thing that can happen for the parties involved is to just do something to take their minds off memories of the argument. Anything to get the mind to stop spinning around in circles.

Later in life, I also got into meditation for a while. I wonder if there's an argument here that some subset of gamers are predisposed to be good meditators because the two activities induce similar brain states?

It is known as "zen state" aka peak state. Being in the zone. Happens with all skilled actions that are so well trained, they become almost automatic. Attaining this kind of state while not actually using a mastered skill is the whole point of zen. But that does sound like an oxymoron since meditation is a masterful skill in itself..;-)

Is it possible that people simply continue to think about what they were trying to learn, consciously or not, when given no tasks? Why is the control comparing people who tried to learn information and then took a break to people who tried to learn even more information? Would a more insightful control be to look at how people who took a break compared to people who continued studying the material during the break time?

I would expect those who continued to study for more time would have better recall, but that would be incredible if untrue, ie. you could literally learn more by doing less. Taken to the extreme you seem to learn more by doing less at times. For example you'll learn more sleeping 8 hours each night for a week than staying up for a week straight, but I wonder if these short breaks allow for fatigue recovery and memory consolidation, like sleep, or if they simply provide opportunity to think more about material, which would obviously give an advantage as compared to the people in the studies "controls" that have to learn new information.

Anecdotally, I definitely feel that meditation and breaks helps me consolidate my learnings and raise my overall productivity, but I'm not sure I find the particular scientific studies described here to be highly convincing of that.

My thought is too much focus on a thing can cause blockages in the deeper processing of that thing.

I'm sure many engineers are familiar with the concept of banging their head against the keyboard all day on what's a seemingly simple issue/bug, only to find the solution miraculously appear hours later in their heads out of thin air - maybe over dinner talking to a friend, maybe awaking in the middle of the night, maybe in the shower the next morning. The point is it all happened a good chunk of time away from the glow of the screen with their debugger at hand. It's a combination of having space to process subconsciously which is often spurred on by a context switch.

I imagine a similar thing happens with learning, perhaps even the act of trying to recall something that happened in the past itself causes a deeper processing/association in your brain. All of a sudden you're not relying so much on rote memory but deeper, somewhat disparate contextual cues to aid in the recall.

Being creative (debugging loosely falls in that category) and learning has to be different. When creating or inventing you can fall well and truly inside the box, taking a break helps you think outside the box, learning sounds like the more in the box/zone the more you get it.

TLDR; sometimes you want a new perspective, sometime re-energise, taking a break is an easy way to get both. You

But that's the thing - I believe deep learning is actually a creative process. The new information needs to fit in your existing model of what you already know/believe, and doing so is a creative endeavor. The more you move away from that the more you end up with rote memorization.

That's why people respond better to different teaching styles, different angles of explanation, top-down vs. bottom-up, etc - because they better align with how their creative mind works.

To a degree: if you over-strain to recall, you’ll actually train your brain to struggle with that item. Better to limit the time you spend retrying to recall before giving up and looking up the answer.

I think there's probably a high correlation between consistently straining to remember something, and some form of interference going on - the better option would likely be to cut short the effort to recall, and instead identify why recall was difficult, identify any interfering information and devise a way to better remember it.

So in short, I think consistently struggling to recall something is an indication that you need to build a better recall strategy for it.

I'm interested to know why you think it's unintuitive. Certainly it matches my personal experience very well. For example, I have certain Anki cards which I see and immediately think "oh God, not this card again, this one's really difficult" whether or not I actually know the answer to it.

I think its unintuitive because I have flashcards that I now have memorized pat that took me ages to recall easily.

Of course I don't think of them as bad, only "If its hard to remember, it'll be hard to forget". Aka, the ones that I have a hard time learning are the ones I always remember. I'll probably never forget the german word for security guard, die Sicherheitsbedienstete but it took me ages to memorize it.

For some odd reason that is my intuition, which appears to be not that of everyone. But my approach to learning is "failure is a good thing, its how you learn", which might be all the difference amounts to in the end.

That's a good approach. I suspect, for others (and in my experience) when one consistently comes to The Difficult Card, they might have spent more time remembering that it was hard to remember than remembering the answer.

Or, they agonize over the answer for too long, then when they flip it over, they think "Of course!" but move along almost immediately.

And I think you're right also; when you finally get it, it's hard to forget.

That gives me an idea for a personal experiment. Have a session or two where your default attitude to every card is "this is really easy" and try not to think of any card as difficult in any way. Compare your recall percentage for the session compared to previous ones (Anki's statistics are great for this). I'll try this experiment myself.

There is an inverted U relationship between cortisol levels and memory formation. Going from no stress to low stress enhances learning, but as stress levels continue to increase learning begins to degrade. This relationship is well documented in the scientific literature.

> In each case, the researchers simply asked the participants to sit in a dim, quiet room, without their mobile phones or similar distractions. “We don’t give them any specific instructions with regards to what they should or shouldn’t do while resting,” Dewar says. “But questionnaires completed at the end of our experiments suggest that most people simply let their minds wander.”

I agree with you entirely. I want to make a few points though. First is that even when I am actively listening to someone speaking, my brain will make associations with the new information (coming from my auditory sensory registers), so I context-switch involuntarily every second. Think of process preemption.

This works all thanks to the fact our auditory sensory registers can withhold information longer than
visual's (and the reason why we tend to forget what we see).

> if they simply provide opportunity to think more about material, which would obviously give an advantage as compared to the people in the studies "controls" that have to learn new information.

The second point I want to make is eyewitness testimony and memory biases. Given enough time, a witness can tell untruth. There is a limit to how long we can keep the "truth" in our brain. Long-term memory is not a perfect storage system. Without rote rehearsal, our memories will decay. During our sleep, some believe (at least this is how I was taught in my class) that the brain will do "garbage collection", basically removing things the brain don't think is important.

Onto the third and the last point. Our brain can develop by forming new neurons (or undevelop skills by killing neurons). When a person becomes deaf after an accident, then his/her speech ability will lose over time. Thanks to our neuroplasticity, we can reverse the change by learning again, though we may not recover 100%. This is happening to me: some of my cognitive functions have stopped functioning well after an accident last summer, I have been trying hard to recover, even though there are some improvements, I don't know how much can recover. In general, I am impaired and disabled.

I just started my neuroscience studies, so I recommend reading on dendrite spines. They are "cute" and play vital role involving memory.

I feel (i.e. just my own subjective experience) it's not only the formation of memory that benefits from mental "down time" but also the gradual solution of abstract problems, such as the ones we come across in building complicated information systems.

I'm not sure about this:

>> we should aim for “minimal interference” during these breaks – deliberately avoiding any activity that could tamper with the delicate task of memory formation. So no running errands, checking your emails, or surfing the web on your smartphone.

Whilst I agree that cluttering up the brain with other similar sorts of information (so stuff in emails or web) is counter-productive, I feel (again just my own experience) that undertaking a completely different sort of activity which exercises the brain in different ways (so for me things like a bike ride, chopping firewood, kicking a footy with the kids) can have great results. Getting back to the original task, I do often find progress has come out of "thin air".

I've found this technique also helps when trying to learn challenging (for me) things on the guitar. The act of learning to play something new means inducing muscle memory as well as simply memorizing the tune. I work on it in the evening to the point where I don't feel like I'm making progress any more. When I come back to it the next day, I find I've made progress.

Lot of comments about meditation here. The thing is, most forms of meditation are active -- for example, pay attention to your breath. Presumably at least some of the mind wandering that went on in this study was about the material, and most (though not all) forms of meditation would suppress that.

My takeaway from my thus far limited experience practicing mindfulness meditation is that (at least that particular form of meditation) it is not about suppressing thoughts. It's not about actively quieting the mind. Rather, it's about becoming an observer of the thoughts in your mind, rather than the active participant you usually are. You view your thoughts as if they were just another sense from the external world. i.e. you become a passive observer.

So, at least mindfulness meditation, is passive. And that's a rather popular form of meditation these days. It may have the same effects the article discusses, as a result.

(NOTE: The focus on breath during mindfulness training is temporary, and is really just a technique to get you to A) relax and B) begin to focus on the present and sensations you don't normally observe).

I have seen other people who have this conception of meditation, but I am not sure it paints the whole picture. Among the different schools of meditation there are both those that tend to "suppress thoughts" and those that simply observe whatever arises.

In the first category I would put techniques which teach you to focus on a meditation object, most often the breath or a mantra. If someone says "mindfulness meditation" I generally think they are referring to this kind of meditation, and examplars can be found in books like Mindfulness in Plain English or The Mind Illuminated (even though there are also both quite different approaches to meditation, one being focused on "insight" first and the other based on "concentration" first). They don't teach you to suppress thoughts, but they teach you to focus on a particular thing and IGNORE thought, which has the effect, long term, of causing those thoughts not to arise.

But there are also schools that focus on "open awareness" or "just sitting" styles of meditation. This is very common teaching in Zen Buddhism but is also practiced in some schools Tibetan Buddhism, at least in Dzogchen. This, I think, is what you are referring to; where you sit and observe at a mental distance whatever thoughts arise. Eventually, this also causes thoughts to arrive much less frequently.

If you are referring to the research literature, however, I think mindfulness generally refers to the first kind. As with everything, the borders blur together.

I also like the mindfulness approach of Ellen Langer, who recommends active observation of surroundings, which has a side effect of quieting the mind and providing the same benefits (for me at least) of breathing-focused mindfulness meditation. Almost like a shortcut right to your point B.

"Mindfulness, she tells the medical school audience, is the process of actively noticing new things, relinquishing preconceived mindsets, and then acting on the new observations. Much of the time, she says, our behavior is mindless."

You're ignoring the part of it that's difficult. Like saying that not being addicted to a drug or poker machines is effortless because the action of not picking up the needle or not pulling the handle is almost effortless.

I’ve noticed that if I don’t bring my phone to the toilet, I return to work with fresh thoughts and ideas, especially—queue this article—if I’ve just been zoning out instead of thinking (to the extent possible, I’m not so good at meditating).

For anybody perusing the comments here for tips on how to better learn, consider reading "Make it stick". It's a research backed book about the most effective study methods. It starts off with the most research backed and simple techniques to the more complex and less well understood learning concepts.

Here's the kicker: the two most common techiques, rereading and cramming, are the least effective.

The underlying theme about what is effective: anything you can to do to make learning take more effort, while not hindering it, generally improves it. That includes spaced repetition, practicing recall in different settings, and even something as mundane as pre-modifying the text to replace random letters with underscores. Also, testing is very important to both to measurement of learning and the actual learning process itself. Don't forget a proper feedback loop either.

Lastly, something I appreciated reading in the books was how as often as possible, there were studies done in classrooms to try to quantify how small technique and curriculum changes actually impact student learning.

When my son was in grade school, he had to learn the 13 colony names. He could only get about seven of them before stumbling. I told him to try memorizing them before he went to bed and he would do better in the morning.

Needless to say, in the morning, he could rip off all 13 in a row without effort. I've found this method to work for me, too.

This worked for me in middle school when I had to memorize German-language poems while not knowing German. It was rather magical how I could go to sleep unable to regurgitate the words and have no problem the next morning. These days I don't have many opportunities to test my rote memory abilities, thankfully.

This. A lot of people get so caught up in the benefits of doing nothing they forget it’s dangerous to do too little. One technique that’s worked wonders for me is breaking up doing nothing with 15 minutes of doing something. That way I’m not doing nothing or something all of the time.

I had the same reaction to the title, however the article is extremely convincing: in one case an 11-fold increase in recall.

I will use this for the rest of my life. By the way I used the technique after reading the article. Likely this is why I recall the 11-fold figure. I even remember the numbers: 7% recall to 79% recall for the case I just quoted. This is far from normal for me.

This is probably the most important article I read in the past year on HN.

Here's a technology aid: a smartphone / smartwatch app that lets you add reminders by voice command with phrases like "remember to call your mother" or "remember that your locker combination is 98-7-65": http://bit.do/Treycent